As a product management professional, it is your duty to ensure that your product and its unique advantages are being understood by your customers and non-customers. This is of critical importance today, where a majority of the consideration process is happening online. Users and buyers today spend about 79% of their buying cycle without a vendor being involved and it usually takes an engagement with at least two or three pieces of collateral before they contact a vendor. So, what are the kinds of product content that you need to create to ensure that your product enters into the consideration set of users and buyers?
The traditional approaches to this involve:
· Web pages: An aesthetically pleasing website with information about your product, the business problems it solves, and its key differentiators is of critical importance. This is the first place that prospects, customers, and non-customers will engage with your product. Therefore, you want to ensure that the pages related to your product are informative, well laid out, accurate, and effective.
· Whitepapers: If you are not a thought leader or do not have a point of view about your technology space, the business problem that you solve, or your methodology, it is time to have it NOW. People want to understand the space that you play in, the way you’re going to make their life better and the advantages of engaging with you. Time for some whitepapers!
· Data sheets: Here’s your chance to talk about yourselves and the features and functionality that you bring to the table. Usually of one to two pages in length, the data sheet is the most about your technology. You need one of those for every major product or feature set.
The three above pieces of collateral are an absolute must. But remember, much as people are going to visit those web pages and download the content, don’t expect this to work magic for your sales pipeline. To cajole audiences into taking the next step, you will need to engage with them more. And so, you need more compelling content – that is more in line with the times.
Here are some ideas for some great product content:
- Blogs: This is the world of social media. People may not read a one page data sheet, but they will definitely spend a minute or so to read a blog post that talks about much of the same in a lot more informal, collegial way. After all, it is so much easier to tweet, share, like, and comment on blog posts. Well, this is the generation of the Millennials and so, your product content has to be in a way that they can engage with it.
- Animated videos: People love cartoons. If you can get a professionally created and edited video that can describe your product’s functionality or differentiators – nothing like it. However, remember to keep this to one video per product. You can do one video with multiple chapters for different areas of functionality. However, remember not to overuse this medium. Too many animated videos and you’re going to be the cartoon.
- Case studies: People relate to others in similar situations. Nothing resonates like a story of someone who was in a similar situation whose pain and suffering by alleviated by your product. This can be in the form of short one-pagers or even blog posts. However, this is essential if you want to make that connect
- End user videos: Can you get one of your end customers talk about you in a short video clip? Can you embellish that video with shots of his company add in some music, and some breaker content? You’ve got yourself a winner!
- Chalk talks: Simple, easy to create, and effective, Chalk talks need you, the product manager to explain functionality on a white board. It is what you do anyways. Just that this time, you do it in front of a camera instead of live people. And lo and behold, you have a great content asset ready.
Do you have to do this? Absolutely! If you have the luxury of a separate product marketing manager at your firm, then he will be doing all of this for you. But you will still need to work closely with him to construct a lot of the content for him. However, if you happen to be the only “product person” in the firm like yours truly, you’ll be creating a lot of this yourself. And guess what? Despite the fact that this seems like a lot, it will still not be a full time activity. You’ll still get a lot of time to do your competitive analysis, talk and plan product strategy, do your business planning and projections, follow up with sales, talk with engineering, discuss the future of alliances, and speak with analysts.
Have you been doing anything other than this at your firm that should make this list? Let me know so that I can do it too.
